Characterizing long-term forest disturbance history and its drivers in the Ning-Zhen Mountains, Jiangsu Province of eastern China using yearly Landsat observations (1987–2011)

Forest losses or gains have long been recognized as critical processes modulating the carbon flux between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Timely, accurate and spatially explicit information on forest disturbance and recovery history is required for assessing the effectiveness of existing forest management. The major objectives of our research focused on testing the mapping efficacy of the vegetation change tracker （VCT） model over a forested area in China. We used a new version of VCT algorithm built upon the Landsat time series stacks （LTSS）. The LTSS consisted of yearly image acquisitions to map forest disturbance history from 1987 to 2011 over the Ning-Zhen Mountains, Jiangsu Province of east China. The LTSS consisted of TM and ETM＋ scenes with different projec- tions due to distinct data sources （Beijing remote sensing ground station and the USGS EROS Center）. The valida- tion results of the disturbance year maps showed that most spatial agreement measures ranged from 70 to 86 %, comparable with the VCT accuracies reported for many places in USA. Very low accuracies were identified in 1995 （38.3 %） and 1992 （56.2 %） in the current analysis. These resulted from the insensitivity of the VCT algorithm to detect low intensity disturbances and also from the mis- registration errors of the image pairs. Major forest distur- bance types existing in our study area were identified as agricultural expansion （39.8 %）, urbanization （24.9 %）, forest management practice （19.3 %）, and mining （12.8 %）. In general, there was a gradual decreasing trend in forest cover throughout this region, caused principally by China＇s economic, demographic, environmental and political policies and decisions, as well as some weather events. While VCT has largely been used to assess long term changes and trends in the USA, it has great potential for assessing landscape level change elsewhere throughout the world.

Development of time series stacks of Landsat images for reconstructing forest disturbance history

Forest dynamics is highly relevant to a broad range of earth science studies,many of which have geographic coverage ranging from regional to global scales.While the temporally dense Landsat acquisitions available in many regions provide a unique opportunity for understanding forest disturbance history dating back to 1972,large quantities of Landsat images will need to be analysed for studies at regional to global scales.This will not only require effective change detection algorithms,but also highly automated,high level preprocessing capabilities to produce images with subpixel geolocation accuracies and best achievable radiometric consistency,a status called imagery-ready-to-use(IRU).This paper describes a streamlined approach for producing IRU quality Landsat time series stacks(LTSS).This approach consists of an image selection protocol,high level preprocessing algorithms and IRU quality verification procedures.The high level preprocessing algorithms include updated radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction for calculating surface reflectance and precision registration and orthorectification routines for improving geolocation accuracy.These automated routines have been implemented in the Landsat Ecosystem Disturbance Adaptive System(LEDAPS)designed for processing large quantities of Landsat images.Some characteristics of the LTSS developed using this approach are discussed.

Characteristics of Si-PIN nuclear radiation detectors stacked in series and parallel

The silicon-based diodes coated with a thin film of neutron reactive materials have been shown to produce excellent neutron detectors. We have fabricated the thin-film-coated single Si-PIN neutron detectors and stacked ones coupled in series and parallel in this work. The stacked detectors show the advantage of improving the detection efficiency of neutron detecting, which essentially attributes to the increase of the effective detection area. It is shown that the stacked detector in series has more superior performance than the parallel one. This work provides a feasible method to develop solid-state semiconductor neutron detectors with high neutron detection efficiency and high response speed.